About seven different people yesterday directed me to this Gizmodo article, in which a young woman, Alyssa Bereznak recounts a horror story she endured attempting to use OKCupid to find an online date. Fair enough, I thought, but this better be one hell of a story to warrant its own Gizmodo post.

She talks about the pains of being a woman on the site, plagued by horrific and crude messages from guys left and right (something many of my female friends can attest to), and finally she settles on a "normal" sounding suitor.

Little did she know, this seemingly cool guy was in fact... A NERD!

Actually, he was nerd royalty. His name was Jon Finkel, and he's the Magic the Gathering card game champion of the entire world, and a legend of the game who had his own feature in Wired and is now a successful hedge funder. Her reaction after she learned about this aspect of his life?

"At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? "Yes." Strike one. How often? "I'm preparing for a tournament this weekend." Strike two. Who did he hang out with? "I've met all my best friends through Magic." Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. Eventually I even felt a little bit bad that I didn't know shit about the game. Here was a guy who had dedicated a good chunk of his life to mastering Magic, on a date with a girl who can barely play Solitaire. This is what happens, I thought, when you leave things out of your online profile."

In short: "Magic? OMG ew!"

Now, I'm not here to debate about just how shallow of a person Ms. Bereznak is, the internet has lambasted her plenty for this. The fact that people can be superficial or stuck in a high school mindset is not news, as it unfortunately happens every day, even as the stigma of "nerdom" is slowly fading from popular culture as almost everyone likes superheroes and video games these days.

Rather, I want to look at the fact that as of the time I'm writing this, that article has 529,280 views. For those of you lacking a frame of reference, that's an astonishing number, especially for something a mere 12 short paragraphs long.

I think that Alyssa knew EXACTLY what she was doing when she wrote this post. It's the tried and true practice of online nerd-baiting in order to get traffic, and this, perhaps more than any other example, shows just how well it works.

People love to hate, and therefore writing a post trashing something people love, or stating an opinion that can so obviously be demolished is clearly bating for traffic. This is a practice I've seen across many of the Gawker sites before (Gizmodo being one of them), but this is a whole new level.

The fact that this was published on Gizmodo (the tech blog) rather than say, Jezebel (the snarky female empowerment blog) within the Gawker network speaks volumes about what they were trying to do. Gizmodo's readership is hugely male, and hugely tech savvy and therefore mostly "nerdy" in the traditional sense. To post something trashing a "geeky" activity like Magic the Gathering would be the equivalent of their video game blog Kotaku writing a post trashing professional eSports. Oh wait, they did that too.

Why does this happen? Why would a woman subject herself to be publicly dragged through the mud by the entire male population of the internet? It's because the life of a freelancer is based around getting hits, as the more you get, the more you get paid. This is especially true with the notoriously sketchy Gawker pay model, and though I don't know specific numbers, I can safely say that Alyssa is riding a wave of nerd tears all the way to the bank after this post.

It's an easy trap to fall into, and as a freelancer (and also a nerd myself) I can testify to the temptation to bait. I found myself dipping into such a practice last week by pure accident when I wrote an opinion piece claiming Google Plus wasn't all that great. My posts don't usually get more than a few thousand hits, so I figured I might get a few comments here and there disagreeing, but I didn't anticipate the reaction I got.

That post now sits as my most popular of all time at over 100,000 views, and I spent the next WEEK reading through comments from angry G+ users about how I was wrong and guilty of the type of "nerd baiting" I'm condemning here.

It was genuinely not my intention, and I tried to write a few thoughtful follow-up pieces engaging the community afterwards and people could see I believed in the points I was making. But the fact is, it's hard to argue with the results, as such tactics clearly do work for getting hits, intentional or not.

So as a freelancer, and as a publisher, you have to ask yourself how much you want to sell your soul in order to bring in page views. I'm sure that was Gizmodo's highest trafficked day in a long while, but at the cost of most people visiting saying "Wow, how could they have actually published this?" Alyssa might be getting a fat bonus check at the end of the month, but at the cost of having her name permanently etched into the internet as a shallow, mean human being. Was it worth it? I'll let them decide. All we can do in the future to fight such practices is to ignore them, but from what I've seen, we nerds just can't let things like this slide, and so our anger will continue to be used as currency.